Jeff Carreira: I've known you for many years, and you are a deep spiritual practitioner and a healer. Initially you were a massage therapist and, more recently, have expanded into more energetic and spiritual healing. I also know that you have struggled and triumphed through the challenges of being energetically depleted. Before we dive into specifics, would you tell us a little more about your background and your journey?

Lauralee Kelly: Sure. I became a massage therapist when I was 19 years old. I was just out of high school and it was clear in massage school that I was naturally good at it. Initially I was really self-conscious, insecure and timid in the training. But then something clicked and all of a sudden, there was a noticeable difference. In terms of my soul journey, it seemed that something was allowed to start moving through me at that point. I came from an environment that wasn't nurturing or supportive of that energy, or of seeing me with any depth. And so massage became the vehicle through which a very important part of me was able to emerge. And I love my career, but definitely have always had a tendency to overextend myself. I really didn't know how to manage my energy. I was just always full throttle. I gave eight massages a day for many, many years.

I’ve received so much joy, learned so much about myself, and even experienced personal healing through my work, but there was always something about boundaries that I had trouble navigating. It’s been a lifelong journey to learn how to navigate that well. First I had to learn how to give to myself first before I gave to others. And I discovered how important it was for me to listen to what I need while I work. I do that now, but I didn't know how to in the beginning. I would just give until the tank was empty, and I would still keep going. Our bodies are not equipped to sustain that for long periods of time, or at least my body isn’t, certainly not for many, many years. I only stopped doing massage in my third decade as a massage therapist. That's a long time.

It was during the pandemic that I made the decision to stop. I had looked over the edge of that cliff and wanted to take that leap for many years. During the pandemic, I had to stop working. It was like a forced sabbatical. That was truly a gift for me. I didn't know if I would ever be able to do that work again. In that space, I saw a new possibility for myself. I had been working towards it for many years. You and I studied Lomi Lomi massage with Jody Mountain for instance and that helped me really learn to listen to my body.

Jeff Carreira: I've known you for a long time and I knew you through this transition. I know that during those years when you were looking over the cliff you were also suffering quite a bit from what is often called chronic fatigue. Can you tell us a little bit about that mysterious sense of depletion that you lived with?

Lauralee Kelly: There's so much to say about that. I do think it really comes back to some of the unhelpful attitudes and assumptions our culture holds about health. And over the last few years I have seen this even more clearly because of what’s known as long COVID. I have clients that are navigating long COVID, and because I’ve navigated chronic illness or chronic depletion, I can understand what they're going through because it's actually exactly the same. A lot of the symptoms are exactly the same and Western medicine has not been very good at understanding it, diagnosing it, or treating it.

The thing I learned was that the only treatment that ultimately works is deep internal rest. There was a belief I held in my mind that told me I had to do what I was doing; I had to overextend. And it is important to realize that overextending does not just mean in big ways. There are small ways, tiny ways, that we can go too far and those are often the cause of our fatigue. I am talking about overscheduling ourselves, or pushing ourselves a little further than comfortable in every moment. I had no inner foundation that was grounded and energetically intact. There was no place inside me that I could fill up and use as a reservoir. I didn't know how to locate a reservoir inside myself that I could actively regenerate throughout the day.

Finding that inner reservoir and consciously regenerating it through deep rest helped me more than anything else. Of course I had to stop doing the hard manual labor of massage. But it is more than that. Every decision is made from an internal position that prioritizes what my body needs. I need to be continuously asking myself, Am I listening to myself? What is my body asking of me? What is fatigue telling me? The body is always communicating with us. And if we listen, it will always tell us what's happening and what we need. Developing that depth of self-listening was the single most important thing that helped me, and I continue to cultivate that listening every single day and support others, in my work, to listen to their own bodies in the same way.

Jeff Carreira: From the little I know, chronic fatigue is attributed to different causes in different cases. It seems like a symptom more than a cause in itself. It probably has various causes in different people, but I think the contours of your journey apply generally to many people suffering with chronic fatigue. Part of your journey was a decision to discontinue working as a massage therapist which meant leaving the lucrative business that you had spent most of your adult life developing. You felt drawn to working in more energetic forms of healing that would allow you to utilize more of your gifts as a healer without the physical exertion of massage. Now, just a few years, later you've made that leap and are finding success as you rediscover yourself.

I would love for you to say a little about that transition because I know that many people are considering making a parallel shift in their own life, but it's rare for people to take that leap into the unknown. It’s so easy for us to keep going with what is familiar even if it is draining our energy. You jumped off that cliff and took that risk. Can you tell us about that?

Lauralee Kelly: I was doing a yearlong program with you when I started that transition and the support that I received from that program, and the people who were in it with me, was absolutely essential. I needed that lift. I needed support to be able to take that leap. It was so important to make that decision in the context of being witnessed making it. I remember someone in that program telling me that they were hearing me say that I am done and I realized that my body had already been clear about that for a long time. The symptoms of fatigue were telling me that I was done for years, but that bodily language wasn't translating clearly enough for me, and I remember feeling unclear and confused for so long.

I let all of my clients know of my plan, and as you mentioned after 30 years I had a successful business as a massage therapist. It was literally the practice of my dreams and the summer season, my busiest, was in full swing when I decided that I was done. And I had no idea what I was going to do next. I was looking into graduate school programs, I even applied for one and did a semester of work. But there was something in me that recognized this was my old tendency again. I was looking for the answer outside of myself, and I wanted external validation and security. When I saw what I was doing, I made the decision to just do nothing and just sit in the unknown.

Eventually I started to work with people in a new way. I did what I had done for myself and just started listening deeply in all of my sessions. I was practicing with my new clients what I had been doing internally to heal myself, which is listening deeply and with my whole body. Soon new things started to emerge, and people were having powerful experiences, both energetically and in terms of insights. My work began to move into a dimension of inner child work and deep healing. It also opened up into powerful emotional releases. My work took on more of a shamanic form and it is still growing and changing in different ways. While all this was happening, I had a lot of people supporting me by telling me that they believed in me and encouraging me to keep going.

Jeff Carreira: I'm aware that more recently, you've had or are beginning to have a breakthrough in your own chronic fatigue symptoms and your sense of energy that offers a miraculous ending to your story. Can you tell us about the transformation in your health that has opened you to a very different level of vitality?

Lauralee Kelly: Last August, I had an experience in a healing session that I was receiving from a friend of mine. And I was on the way to the session and I had to drive a few hours to get there. While I was on the way, I started to feel energy moving. I wasn't really sure what was happening, but I was aware that a lot of energy was already clearing hours before the session. And then when I got into the session, I had what I would describe as a Kundalini activation. It was a very powerful energy that felt like a serpent, and blew through all of my energy centers. At that time I was already doing much better with my fatigue, but I was still navigating around a certain baseline level of fatigue. I had also been diagnosed with Hashimotos, which is autoimmune hypothyroidism, and I was taking a small dose of thyroid medication.

After that session I knew something had happened. It was very clear after the session that my thyroid had cleared. I took two weeks off of work after that, and again it was in the middle of a busy summer season. I decided to go somewhere by myself to integrate what had happened. It felt huge, a massive energetic clearing. After that I decided to stop taking the thyroid medication against my doctor's wishes. And so far, my thyroid is normal as far as I can tell, and it's been more than six months. Since then I have experienced a series of big energetic clearings and each feels like a miracle occurring. I'm beginning to understand that I am coming into a deeper relationship with the element of fire, because I think the fatigue I experienced in my life was from a depletion of my own internal fire.

I'm coming to see that I need to cultivate that fire on my own. A healer I worked with a long time ago used to tell me that they could show me the miracle, but it was up to me to keep it. I've always remembered those words and now I see that the miracle is here, but I have to live my life in a way that can maintain it, which means maintaining my own inner fire. That's where I'm at now. I'm just continuing to integrate and cultivate all of that with daily practices, with diet, with every decision that I make. I am careful about how I spend my time, and how I use and cultivate my creative energy.

Jeff Carreira: You're saying you have needed to make changes in your life in terms of your diet and what you do and where you place your energy to promote the cultivation of more fire. Is that an intuitive process? Do you intuit what needs to change?

Lauralee Kelly: Yes, I think it comes back to rest and relaxation and listening. The question is, how deeply can I listen to what life is trying to tell me? All the symptoms that I had were really big communications, and it took a while to be able to translate those and hear them. I'm still listening and still learning. There were times when I also had the awareness that what I was experiencing is not just about me and my body, my journey and my healing. It's collective. I have a growing awareness that we are really one. Our energetic field, our electromagnetic field, is really that of the Earth. And so what I feel in my chronic depletion is also the Earth expressing something that it is feeling. I think it's important to understand that we're really not in isolation, we are not distanced from anything happening in this world. It can feel like we are because we're so far removed from many of the horrors that are happening, but we’re really not. And so our listening and our healing is part of something much bigger.

Jeff Carreira: It's interesting to connect your experience to the Earth. It seems that many people are experiencing various forms of fatigue and it feels important to at least consider that it might all be connected to the fatigue of our planet.

Lauralee Kelly: In certain moments I get that sense downloaded into me. I realize that when you have something that's chronic like that, the danger is that it keeps you separate. We think about my suffering and my pain. It keeps you hooked in a sense of separation continuously. But, that experience can also connect us to everything when we see that fatigue is all around us on the planet.

Jeff Carreira: That download about the planetary nature of this, how does that affect you personally and also in terms of the work that you do?

Lauralee Kelly: Part of my practice is now focused on coming into a deeper relationship with the Earth and with staying deeply grounded. I do grounding every day. I do it in every single session. I teach it to everyone that I work with. Normally we visualize grounding as if we send roots down into the Earth away from us. We feel like we are connecting to the Earth. But what I see now is that what we're really doing is connecting to ourselves because there's no difference between the Earth and us. There's no separation. It just appears that we're separate. I feel compelled to share that perspective, and it seems to resonate with people. It seems that whatever doorway has opened in me allows me to come from a place that can communicate that message, not so much with words but in the embodiment of it. A lot of the work I do involves a somatic listening, and somatic work with energy and emotions.

Jeff Carreira: Undoubtedly some people who read this interview will be suffering from some form of chronic fatigue, what would your advice be to people suffering from those symptoms?

Lauralee Kelly: My advice would be to spend time in dialogue with your symptoms. It is not necessarily a communication coming from the mind, but somehow we need to come into acceptance. I would suggest not pushing against something that is perceived as uncomfortable or hard or difficult or painful and instead to come into a more friendly relationship with it. Try to understand what life is communicating with you. Work to be friends with it, because resistance will block us from understanding.